The thought of the moment

Today Amy Gallo, a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, released a blog post about managing email. There is some good solid advice here and thought I would share it, you can read her post here.

I’d like to take this one step farther than just managing your inbox. What about when you are sending an email and want someone to actually read, better yet reply, to it?

Next time you write an email subject line, think twice about the words you’re using.

Loading your message with words such as confirm, join, press, or invite is not a good idea of you want a response, says data gathered from Baydin, the maker of the email scheduler Boomerang.

Baydin recently extracted data from five million emails its users handled – either using the company’s “email game” or scheduled for later delivery via Boomerang. It found that some subject-line words, such as “apply” and “opportunity,” got more responses than words from the aforementioned list.

Its data also suggests the best time to send email is before work. Users who scheduled messages to read later, using Boomerang, most often wanted to deal with them around 6am.

Already sending emails packed with “opportunity” at 6am and not getting a response? You’re in good company.

Baydin’s average email game player deleted about half of the 147 messages he or she received each day. Ninety minutes of the two hours he or she spent on email each day went to just 12 messages. Be one of those 12!